I work for a car dealership and would like to be able to monitor the changes in inventory of our competitor. In essence, I would like to do the following:
Go to the competitor web page (let’s use this page as an example: https://www.toyotaofanaheim.com/new-vehicles/), where they list each car in their inventory. As it can be seen, this may be a multi-page inventory list, requiring scrolling through as many as 20 pages.
Extract the current state of their inventory and place the data in a table, which includes several pieces of information listed for each vehicle (model, VIN, price, etc.)
At the end of each day run a monitor to see what changes have occurred on their inventory page, and extract that data in a table format.
I would like to be able to create a table showing the new inventory status, and include the changes that occurred for each model.
My question is: is it possible to accomplish this inside Distill, or do I need additional tools?
thanks for reaching out and sharing your use case @zzzagman. it is possible to get structured data using a scraper. distill currently offers managed scrapers. here, “managed” implies that distill creates and manages the configurations.
we create and manage the scrapers for popular sites so that it is easy for our users to create the monitors. we plan to offer a visual tool to let end users create their own scrapers in the near future.
would you like to create your own scrapers or prefer to use on created by distill?
If feasible, I would like to use a Distill scraper. It would make it simpler.
The visual tool you are mentioning would be great! (I don’t think a managed solution is helpful here because, if this tool proves helpful, the boss might want to also monitor another competitor, at which time you would have to create yet another managed scraper, etc. And all these managed tools might not be useful to anyone else…)